"I came here to apologise finally, after all these years, not for you but for me; I needed to expunge the guilt which I feel. This guilt, I buried deep within me these past thirty years, I certainly wouldn't want you to think I have been agonising for all of that time, but the chance, the coincidences, of events over the last two years have brought you increment by increment, more and more into my thoughts and I knew that, before it was too late, before I go to meet my maker, if maker I have which I strongly doubt, I should go with a semblance of a clear conscience and, at the very least, try and make peace with you if peace were possible, although I did not fully understand the reasons why, after so long a time, I should now think it so necessary. The time for apologies had surely, by now, passed me by and it was, likely as not, only going to be a fool's errand."
She paused again and raised the coffee cup to her lips, although, in truth, there was no coffee left in the cup, as she knew only too well.
"You see," she continued. "I feel like I used to feel in my granny's house in Kampala, in Kenya, after visiting her; it was only just around the corner from my parents' house. I knew I had to get home, to my brother, to my parents, and I wanted very much to, it's just that Granny Patel's was so dear to me, and her house was so wonderfully big to a small child, an adventure in the making, that I never wanted to leave, although I knew, at even that young age, that I must. I feel the same way now.
"You asked me earlier, what it was that made me go outside this morning, dressed as I was, in the freezing air, in only a T-shirt. It was a whistle, a whistling, that called me. I do not know why, but it was insistent and I had to obey. I now know what that whistle was; I heard it when you tried to get Eegit away from her pursuit of the pigeon and I do not doubt that you were calling Fjorgyn in the same way when it somehow impinged on my still sleeping or half sleeping mind, before I awoke, and stayed with me after I had woken up. I didn't get it at all until a half an hour or so ago, when you were calling Eegit back to the lure. It may seem strange to you but, in my mind, I have this awful and strange notion that I am, somehow, being called back to you.
"Don't worry, I am not about to get all sloppy on you and profess the undying love of a dying woman to you; this is not Madame Butterfly and I am not consumptive. As you, yourself, said last night, we are not the same people that fell in love all those tears, sorry years, ago, we are much older and, I hope, that much wiser than we ever could have been at twenty-five; the Pooh-sticks have long since passed under the bridge, the plank bridge by a pool, and I don't think Piglet and Pooh are even on the bridge anymore to find out who won. However, I would like you to know that, were it to be permitted to me, and I know that it should not and will not, I would so very much like spend my final days here, in this place; it is truly so beautiful. Although I am not Arthur nor Guinnevere, his Queen, I would still like to think that there might be a place for me in Avalon somehow; if only to compensate for twenty-five years living in the industrial heartland of Britain, the arsehole of the world that is Wolverhampton. If a place were not be found on that blessèd isle, I wish that I could demand one of Rory's pups, as Roy did, as a reminder of this place and all of its little pleasures. However there's little point to that request either, really; they'd scarcely be out of puppyhood before I croaked and who would then care for him or her.
"I am sorry, I am babbling, ignore me. Sometimes I think that I just like the sound of my own voice too much; perhaps that's why I enjoyed teaching so much! May I ask you one last, and no doubt impertinent, question before I make sure that nobody has stolen my little Peugot 306 during the night?"
"Yes, by all means," he replied. "There are few questions that I am unwilling to answer."
"What happened with your last partner, the consultant?" She asked. "You seemed to have been together for a long time and I doubt you argued much over money. You don't have to answer, I am just curious." She smiled.
"I took an axe to her head one night," he said.
"Joke, Leo? Tell me that was a joke."
"Yes, a joke," he replied. "In any event, she would quickly have turned the tables on me, if I had; mightily strong, our Penny. Cattle farmer's daughter. I think that she used to wrestle heifers in her teens instead of boys." He smiled. "Jokes aside, she died. One of those 'one in a million' deaths. She had no history of any real allergies but she was stung by something, I assume, on a business trip to one of the former Soviet republics, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, I cannot remember exactly where; she was in an office, alone, working in the company's main office block and, seemingly, went into anaphylactic shock; by the time that the people she was consulting for found her and an ambulance called, it was pretty much all over. It cut me up a bit at the time, but by that time we were more 'really good friends with added sex' as opposed to 'husband and wife' and I think that the older you get, and the more deaths of those close to you that you experience, the easier it becomes to cope with it without completely falling apart."
"I'm so sorry, Leo," she said. "Trust me to put my foot in it, again. I should never have asked."
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